Trust requires the appearance of embedded reputational sanction.

Evidence

The master of scam at the center of the play and movie, Six Degrees of Separation, worked his magic on his targets by coming to know enough about them and their family to get them to think of their relationship with him as one involving trust and trustworthiness. They were led to believe that he was a good college friend of their children, and they therefore treated him as such. The trustworthiness they assumed of him was analogous to that in the encapsulated-interest account in that it was, they thought, reputational, because it was grounded in what they thought to be the judgment of their own children and in the scam artist’s ongoing relationship with those children. Without the apparent sanction—past and future—of their children, they would not have welcomed him so gullibly into their lives as they did. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 397

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the blindness novel: the scam artist feigns observability through the children, while the doctor’s wife’s true sight grants her the only real epistemic position. — connects to: Disclosure regulation relies on informed donors and press scrutiny for deterrence. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1346
• SEED: Angle: ‘Trust as theater — why scams work by manufacturing the appearance of third-party observation.’